The Next Draft: Bowditch & Dewey law firm launches group catering to state's craft beer industry

Matt Tota Daily News Staff @MattTotaMDN

Wednesday

Mar 13, 2019 at 11:42 AM

If he ever wanted to open a brewery, Robert Young would rather complete the mound of paperwork required than brew the beer.

Young, who enjoys barrel-aged stouts and double dry-hopped IPAs, knows the intricacies of the state’s tangled liquor license laws. He can defend himself from intellectual property theft and negotiate the terms of a lease. Should he ever have to deal with a distributor to get his beers into the market, he’d have an edge there, too.

But Young is not one of the many homebrewers harboring dreams of owning their own brewery: He’s a lawyer ready to guide them.

In 2014, the law firm Bowditch & Dewey, which has offices in Boston, Framingham and Worcester, created a practice group devoted to the state’s thriving craft beer industry. The firm picked Young, a self-described beer aficionado, to chair the group. And he is among a handful of attorneys in the state dealing specifically with breweries and their legal needs.

“At bottom, these brewers are startup businesses with the same challenges and same potential pitfalls as any startup,” Young said. “We try to be a resource for brewers to handle those pitfalls.”

Bowditch & Dewey’s craft beer practice represents more than a dozen breweries. The firm also publishes a regular craft beer legal blog, with recent posts about the new minimum wage law’s effect on tipped employees and Massachusetts’ happy hour laws.

Along with the 11 other attorneys in the practice, Young has helped breweries acquire the right licensing, secure real estate, manage employees and protect their intellectual property, or IP. The practice represents breweries in negotiations with distributors, while attorneys have walked breweries through the paperwork-intensive early days of opening, such as searching for a location and signing a lease.

“Finding a place to host your brewery and negotiating the lease is a critical step,” Young said. “Starting up a brewery is a capital-intensive exercise, and there are a lot of pieces to put in place before you get your licenses, and before you even generate any revenue. Breweries need to think about how that lease is negotiated. What are the outs? What are the penalty clauses?”

For breweries beginning to hire employees for their brewhouse or taproom, Young’s expertise is in employee management, like understanding that if breweries can’t hire a friend to work for them, then pay them in pints.

“The work we do is on things like how to set up a tip pool — what are the limits to the tip pool at the bar, and can managers get a share of the tips? Or, your head brewer is leaving, what do you do next?” Young said.

According to Young, trademark issues have become more prevalent now with more than 140 breweries open in the state, especially when it comes to naming new beers. “It’s getting harder and harder to trademark specific beer names because there are so many out there,” he said.

Through its blog, Bowditch & Dewey keeps breweries updated on new state laws or changes to existing ones that could affect their business. Young has been following the bill filed recently by state senators Nick Collins of South Boston and Ed Kennedy of Lowell concerning the one-day liquor licenses that have allowed beer gardens to flourish.

The current law says the manager of “any indoor or outdoor activity or enterprise” can apply for a 30-day license. Breweries have managed to operate throughout spring and summer through a loophole, as different people from the same corporate entity can apply for the licenses and extend the license.

“Thirty days can become 60 or 90,” Young explained. But the bill, he said, seeks to add a hard cap of 14 days per year for any person or entity.

At least one of sponsors of the bill now seems to be softening his stance (https://votenickcollins.com/statement-seasonal-liquor-license-reform/); still, Young said, it’s clear bars and restaurants — the main backers of the bill — have a problem with beer gardens.

“The challenge is, when you have success, it starts to create opposition from entities who think it may be detrimental to their own success,” Young said. “In the beer garden case, the bars and restaurants are concerned that beer gardens are going to peel business away from them. I’m not convinced that’s the case.”

Bowditch & Dewey is an associate member of the Massachusetts Brewers Guild, the state’s trade association that works to protect and promote the interests of craft brewers, and Young has taken part in guild events such as “New Brewery Bootcamp,” a day’s worth of workshops aimed to guide brewers through the steps of opening a brewery.

MBG Executive Director Katie Stinchon has relished having lawyers available to her membership. “Brewers just want to make awesome beer and put it in the hands of craft beer lovers, but there is all of this stuff on the back end that they may not think about,” she said.

The MBG has received more calls from law firms interested in joining as associate members, Stinchon said, “because they are building up their craft beer focus or seeing it as an industry that they need to support,” giving her a growing list of attorneys she can point breweries to depending on their question.

“They are so wonderful that they’ll answer questions off the clock, so it saves breweries some money,” she said.